SiCortex's low power, low latency super still on for a summer ship

Ashlee Vance over at The Register checked in with new HPC vendor SiCortex for a status check on its upcoming hardware release. The news right now is no news: SiCortex is still on schedule for a summer ship, with hardware in user beta test right now.

This is a MIPS-based machine (six core chips), aimed at consuming less power than modern clusters and interconnecting processors at lower latency. A full up 972 node SC5832 clocks in at 5832 GFlops and consumes 18 kilowatts. From the story

cstork… lets analyze things just abit. Indeed, I agree with you that an current Intel [call it Clovertown] with the addition of its FBDIMMs will run at 400w. However, when one adds all the board/card/disk peripherals and peg the cpu(s) on the machine, you can easily measure the power utilization at between 600 and 650w. I’ve done it…

John Leidel laid out the calculation better than I could, though I think he meant to say that the Intel configuration consumes 3 times the power of the equivalent SiCortex configuration. (54.6kw/18kw = ~3).

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In this special guest post, Axel Huebl looks at the TOP500 and HPCG with an eye on power efficiency trends to watch on the road to Exascale. "This post will focus one efficiency, in terms of performance per Watt, simply because system power envelope is a major constrain for upcoming Exascale systems. With the great numbers from TOP500, we try to extend theoretical estimates from theoretical Flop/Ws of individual compute hardware to system scale." [Read More...]

White Papers

For this report, DDN performed a number of experimental benchmarks to attain optimal IO rates for Paradigm Echos application workloads. It present results from IO intensive Echos micro-benchmarks to illustrate the DDN GRIDScaler performance benefits and provide some detail to aid optimal job packing in 40G Ethernet clusters. To find out the results download this guide.